


Midwinter

by SpanditaSahoo



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Awesome Howling Commandos, Gen, Get Together, History, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Rebecca remembers their story, Stucky - Freeform, World War II, references to steggy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2019-06-20 14:32:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15536346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpanditaSahoo/pseuds/SpanditaSahoo
Summary: The history books will never know Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes. The greatest soldier in history and his right hand man died well before their time and gave rise to a legend that still prevails today.This is their story, not history's. This is Bucky's little sister left behind to battle the world for herself, this is Bucky and Steve in their little flat in 1943, listening to radio late at night with a bottle of cheap brown liquor and dark smudges of charcoal, this is the Howling Commandoes sitting around a fire, waiting, waiting, waiting because that is half of war, waiting. This is the train and Steve's heart braking and Bucky's heart hammering in fear. This is the men behind the legends - the still round faced boys, too young to be on the Western front, too young to have known war this intimately.





	Midwinter

 

There is an old, junky office tucked into an alleyway about halfway down 1o – 4 Dean Street, Brooklyn, New York. The door is an oxidized military green that blends into the muddy rust that has built up over the years. The circuitry is ancient, last fitted in the late forties for only two lightbulbs that never seem to shed enough light. Rebecca Proctor, once Rebecca Barnes, is celebrating her sixty fifth birthday in a week.

The dated photo frames decorating the dilapidated walls of the corner office feature a handsome young man; a peaked cap, dark suspenders over a white undershirt and loose fitted trousers. The man, not a day over twenty, is lounging across the steps of this very office in the sunlight, from an age long gone. One can clearly see the clean, carved jawlines, the high cheekbones and soft lips curved into a cocky smirk, eyes crinkled in the sunlight, a cigarette – Lucky Strikes, Rebecca will always point out – curled in one hand. This beautiful young man is Rebecca Proctor’s older brother. James Buchanan Barnes.

The famous soldier, a Howling Commando and Steve Rogers’ right hand man, is a war hero turned national icon during the height of the Second World War. The oldest sibling in a family of six, this picture of a beautiful young boy was taken only three months before Pearl Harbor, and seven months before he was drafted to fight the worst war in human history.

Rebecca Proctor still maintains vestiges of her beauty, so similar to her brother – a Barnes family trademark. She is upright in stature, moving slowly with ageless poise and care. Her features are strong and proud of the life that she has led. Rebecca Barnes, only eleven when she heard news of her brother’s death had to grow up far more quickly than most, having grown up in the Great Depression, and suffering great personal tragedy. Following her brother’s untimely demise, the patriarch of the family, George Barnes, suffered a heart attack within months of the news leaving the family of now four with a grief-stricken mother and little to no livelihood. Her older siblings, a pair of twins had married young at only nineteen the year James Barnes had gone off to war, and moved far west to Denver where they lived with their husbands in a poor community.

Rebecca took control of the family finances at her tender age, running expenditures for her mother and herself from the small stipend the Army paid them. She recounts, “I loved my mother just as much as I wished she had loved me. After Bucky and Pa, Winifred – my mother – was just devasted. She retreated to her room in her mourning clothes and hardly ever left again. She used to rest all day on account of her migraines, but she never even tried, not a single day again. I think with Stevie just gone as well, my mother gave in to her grief, forgetting she had another child, another daughter. Well, I did what I had to. I cashed our cheques, paid for our meals, paid the bills, cooked and cleaned. And well, things looked up, you know. The New Deal was working, jobs were looking up again. I took a few jobs as a baby sitter and a housekeeper after school hours and I tried, you know. My sisters, Angie and Betsy, sent letters but they couldn’t visit or help out really, they had kids real soon and so. When I turned seventeen, I graduated and joined the community college. I used to campaign for Eisenhower then Kennedy. The sixties were a riot – live hard, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.”

Her eyes glaze over in fond memories of the past. Rebecca Proctor is a woman who unabashedly lived despite the poor hands fate had dealt her, and the truth of it can be seen in the laugh lines around her mouth and the crinkles in her eyes that exist despite the hard edge her features take on when speaking of her own childhood. After graduating from college Rebecca worked as secretary in the Department of Defense, and later SHIELD. In a few short years however, she left to become a Suffragist, and a champion for the feminist movement roaring across America and Britain at the time, joining the National Organization for Women and becoming an active participant on the national stage.

“Although, I didn’t quite get to live in the party of the sixties. There was serious work to be done. I remember so clearly, this one Sunday, I’m in a bookstore looking for something to pass the day by and I come across this book – The Feminine Mystique and so I bought it and took it over to a café a few blocks down and settled into it. You have to understand what that was like – Betty Friedan, the author, had just then changed the world with that book. It was a national sensation, that carried over to Britain, too. It challenged what it meant to be woman, such a deeply insightful critique of not our society but our roles. She called it an affliction and it was. I read that book in a day, and I resigned the next to go and join the National Organization. Within a few months I joined New York Radical Women, a consciousness raising group, I worked with Carol Hanisch and Gloria Steinem and Sheila Rowbotham. I was a part of a movement, one that was vital to our societies, and our lives in the spirit of equality,” she declares, her eyes sparkling with a fervor not unlike the one that Steve Rogers, a figure as close her older brother, is famed for.

Rebecca Barnes married an engineer by the name of David Johnson Proctor, a Seattle bred man who was in New York on commission and ran into Rebecca Barnes at a feminist protest. The two enjoyed a short but whirlwind romance before getting married in 1965 after only two months of making each other’s acquaintance. Rebecca, Proctor now, left with her husband to Seattle where she worked as an administrator in an elementary school. David and Rebecca had two children, Richard and Cynthia.

Forty years later Rebecca, her husband having died of cancer two years ago and her children with families of their own, moved back to Brooklyn, taking up residence in the old office building her family rented a flat in the 1940s that had miraculously survived.

She writes short poems and stories in her old age, and maintains a correspondence with a local community college, occasionally teaching classes in Social Sciences. The office space is an unkempt living space, a memoir in and of itself to her childhood family rather than a lived-in home for a woman as dynamic as Rebecca Proctor.

 

The room is heavy in the afternoon heat of midsummer New York and the lack of air conditioning makes it positively stifling. The small windows are propped open as far as they go to allow for some ventilation. Rebecca is searching through a large vintage cabinet for some albums. She is determined to tell the story of her brother, infuriated at history fallacy of forgetting a man like James Buchanan Barnes.

Rebecca paints a picture of a glorious young man. James, enshrined in her memory, was the singular most charismatic character in all of Brooklyn. He was a model student, the pinnacle of the All-American boy – smart and witty and impeccably well-mannered albeit with a penchant for mischief. He was a family kind of guy, spoiling his younger sisters with small presents he worked a day for by skipping school, or filched from a street peddler. He learned to cook with his Ma from a young age and went to the garage with his father every weekend.

James was seldom found without a science fiction novel in one hand and beautiful woman in another. Later generations might have coined the term ‘playboy’ but it seemed to have been crafted for him.

He held a job down at the docks on the weekends and worked in an accountant’s office from the day he turned sixteen. A silver tongued, handsome and capable young man by the time he was twenty, James had been universally popular and unusually gifted with a latent talent to get things done. Anyone in the neighborhood needed to find a job, James Barnes had the contacts, someone needed to borrow money, James knew the local lenders well enough to be invited for Sunday dinner.

“Jamie knew things about the world. He used to tuck us in at night while our parents were having a late dinner. I would never let him go without telling us a story. Angie and Betsy always pretended to be too old for his stories, but they’d quiet down too once he started. Oh, the things he would say. All these old Greek heroes travelling through time to stop evil Kaisers and dukes while saving their best gals who always ended up saving the hero right at the end. He loved playing with us too, never shying away from the dollhouses I entertained myself with. He taught us all a mean right hook, you know. Said he knew the boys around town meant trouble and he knew because he was one of those boys.”

“I think he loved Steve best, though. Jamie met Steve when they were both only six. I wasn’t even born then but I knew the stories, every one of us did. Steve was fighting this pack of neighborhood bullies who had been picking on a mangy little cat and managed to win himself a broken nose and a bust lip when Jamie who was passing by with the groceries waded in and pulled them off of Steve. He spilt all the milk and eggs for the week, but he brought Steve home, so our Ma could clean him up. And that was that really. They stuck with each other after that.

Steve was sicker than most of the hospital patient’s combined, but Bucky didn’t care about that. He used to spend the whole day with him, climbing over trees and running down the street in dry summer days, the only weather that Steve’s lungs could take. Bucky would sit and read while Steve would draw, or they’d skip stones from over the dock, or they’d sneak into Reverend Morgan’s back office and stuff fish guts into the back cabinets. Oh, they were inseparable. Our parents didn’t exactly approve of Steve. He was poorer than most, living in a Hooverville for most of the early years we knew him, his father had died in the war according to Sarah, his mother, but she never wore a ring or anything like that. He was too sick usually to go to school, so he was always behind and when he was in class there wasn’t a single day his knuckles wouldn’t be bleeding from the Reverend’s cane for mouthing off in class. It was easier for him to get into a fight than breathe and Jamie always went wading in to either pull him out, or later join him. Steve was bad news, you know, if you asked the neighbors. He worked in the back of a speakeasy with a bootlegger during the Prohibition, because he was good with numbers and always out of school. My ma used to say ‘God knows what Jamie sees in that god forsaken boy’ every time Jamie came home with a bruise, blaming Steve for her son’s wounds. MA learned to like him though. He was too earnest in all his physical frailty that he reminded my mother of a little bird, she explained once. She grew to love Steve over the years just as much she loved Jamie.

Truth is, Steve was everything James wanted to be. Determined to take on the world’s struggles head on, and brave enough to do what he believed in even if it got him killed. Jamie was faithful to Steve and truth was, Steve was just as faithful to his Bucky. I never knew two men who seemed to belong to each other more.”

Rebecca Proctor is a careful keeper of these memories, struggling to keep alive her brother and his best friend as they were and not as history as chosen to remember them. Whether or not their military history is chronicled in museums around the world, these remarkable men who died far too young stay alive here in this dingy room and it is suddenly too clear why this space doesn’t seem to belong to Rebecca as much as it belongs to a near forgotten past – it is a keeper, just like Rebecca, just like the handful of pictures of Steve and Bucky – a keeper of the lives of two Brooklyn boys who would have lived and died unnamed and unnoticed by the world in the boroughs of the greatest city in the world rather than the soldiers they came to be.

**Author's Note:**

> hi, be kind - this is my first multi chapter fic.


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